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vanadium
Asked: 2022-06-14 05:51:46 +0800 CST

How can I install the latest ydotool 1.0.1 (keyboard automation tool working on Wayland) in Ubuntu 22.04?

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The valuable keyboard automation tool xdotool does not work on Wayland. A new tool that mimicks some of the functionality of xdotool, but that works both in Xorg and Wayland, is ydotool.

ydotool is available in the Ubuntu software center as version 0.1.8-3. It the mean time, the tool has been "refactored" in the sense that it has been completely rewritten, has no external dependencies and uses a lot less memory and without dynamic memory allocation. It is at version 1.0.1 as of June 2022.

Only source code is provided on github, without instructions on how to build the code and install the tool. How can we install ydotool 1.0.1. on Ubuntu?

software-installation

1 Answers

  1. Following are installation instructions I tested on Ubuntu 22.04. Credits to here for the compilation instructions using cmake.

    1. Prerequisites

    # Needed for compilation
sudo apt install cmake scdoc
# For generating an installable .deb file
sudo apt install checkinstall
# Optional: git to clone the repository instead of downloading zip
sudo apt install git

    2. Downloading and compiling

    git clone  https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool
cd ydotool
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j `nproc`

    3. Installation

    sudo checkinstall --install=no

    While in checkinstall, it is advised to change the proposed name of the package, build to e.g. ydotool-custom. It can then easily be recognized later on, and will not conflicting with the existing ydotool package of the system repositories.

    # Install the .deb that checkinstall generated
sudo apt install ./build_*_amd64.deb

    4. Configuration

    # Set the suid bit so ydotool can be run by any user
sudo chmod +s /usr/local/bin/ydotool
# Install systemd service
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/systemd/user/ydotool.service /etc/systemd/system/
# Reload the systemd daemon
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo service ydotool start
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